Our audience

The target audience are Lutheran women between the ages of 18 to 35+. Readers vary in age. Our readership is a diverse group with a variety of lifestyles and interests.

Submitting your work

Queries with a sample of your work are preferred. Queries may be submitted via e-mail to [email protected]. Please indicate if the you are submitting work is being considered for publication elsewhere.

Queries about time-sensitive topics should be submitted at least seven months in advance (for example, a query about a Christmas article should be submitted in May.)

Café receives many queries and unsolicited manuscripts; because of this volume, we cannot acknowledge them when they are received. We will contact you if we are interested in your work.

Please know that we ask particular established authors to write on specific themes far in advance of publication. We publish very few articles that originated as unsolicited manuscripts or queries. Those we do accept are most likely to be accepted from Christian women (Though we accept queries from men.)that include stories about women or reflections that especially speak to young adult women.

Developing your article

Once we have contacted you about your query and asked you to develop your article, please follow these guidelines.

Inclusive language is important. For example, the pronoun he should not be used to refer to both males and females. Generally, avoid using pronouns (he, she, his, her) when referring to God, and words for God that are exclusively masculine should be used only rarely (for example, use ruler, not king).

Carefully research your article, checking the accuracy of facts, quotations, names, addresses, and Web site addresses. Please cite all references and add appropriate web links. When quoting Scripture, indicate which translation you are using. Café prefers the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).

We must have full publication information (author, title, page number of quoted text; place of publication, publisher, and date of publication) for any books, articles, or hymn texts cited. We discourage the use of footnotes; please use in-text citations.
Rights

Café usually purchases one-time, first rights; we prefer to print original articles that have not been published elsewhere. Copyright remains with author.

Second rights (when the work has been previously published) are purchased only rarely. If you are offering second rights, please give the name and date of the publication in which the work first appeared.

Please send freelance submissions electronically to: [email protected].